NIA 2012 Enterprise Social Networking Platform Report

01-May-2012

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An eternal optimist, Liu-Yue built two social enterprises to help make the world a better place. Liu-Yue co-founded Oxstones Investment Club a searchable content platform and business tools for knowledge sharing and financial education. Oxstones.com also provides investors with direct access to U.S. commercial real estate opportunities and other alternative investments. In addition, Liu-Yue also co-founded Cute Brands a cause-oriented character brand management and brand licensing company that creates social awareness on global issues and societal challenges through character creations. Prior to his entrepreneurial endeavors, Liu-Yue worked as an Executive Associate at M&T Bank in the Structured Real Estate Finance Group where he worked with senior management on multiple bank-wide risk management projects. He also had a dual role as a commercial banker advising UHNWIs and family offices on investments, credit, and banking needs while focused on residential CRE, infrastructure development, and affordable housing projects. Prior to M&T, he held a number of positions in Latin American equities and bonds investment groups at SBC Warburg Dillon Read (Swiss Bank), OFFITBANK (the wealth management division of Wachovia Bank), and in small cap equities at Steinberg Priest Capital Management (family office). Liu-Yue has an MBA specializing in investment management and strategy from Georgetown University and a Bachelor of Science in Finance and Marketing from Stern School of Business at NYU. He also completed graduate studies in international management at the University of Oxford, Trinity College.







From NIA – National Inflation Association website,

The most eagerly anticipated IPO in world history, the IPO of Facebook, is now less than one month away! Facebook last traded in the private market at a valuation of $110.25 billion and with 2011 revenues of $3.711 billion, Facebook is now worth approximately 29.70 times sales. Earlier this year when Facebook announced their plans to go public in May, we saw a huge surge in the stock prices of nearly all consumer social networking companies that were already publicly traded.

 

Most consumer social networking stocks are now down from their highs, but NIA expects them to make another huge run in the upcoming weeks that lead into the Facebook IPO. The truth is however that NIA believes Facebook is likely to go public near its peak valuation. Although the Facebook IPO is likely to surpass Wall Street’s highest expectations and begin trading at a valuation as high as $150 billion, before soaring to a valuation as high as $200 billion by year end, after the rally is over Facebook will have no where to go but down.

 

Although over 50% of America is on Facebook and actively using Facebook on a regular basis to communicate with their friends and family members, social networking technology has another purpose that will revolutionize the world in an even bigger way. Today at most businesses across the U.S., employees mainly communicate with their co-workers through email. A small percentage of Americans who probably consider themselves to be high-tech, also communicate at work through instant messages (IMs) using an IM service like AIM.

 

The reality is, Americans using emails and IMs at work are just like Americans who still watch a black and white TV at home. The whole world is going social and later this year, American businesses will begin rapidly deploying enterprise social networks within their organization by utilizing the platforms that NIA has reviewed below. Businesses that fail to adopt enterprise social networks using the platforms reviewed below, will be left behind their competitors.

 

Most businesses will decide to use internal enterprise social networking platforms, but NIA believes the best enterprise social platforms will be those that allow businesses to setup both internal networks for communicating with employees, as well as external networks for communicating with customers. One innovative publicly traded company in NIA’s review below BroadVision Inc. (BVSN) not only allows businesses to create both private internal and public external networks, but BVSN’s Clearvale platform allows for the creation of hybrid networks that are semi-private.

 

By giving businesses the unique ability to create hybrid semi-private networks, which is a function that no other enterprise social platform offers, BVSN’s Clearvale allows businesses to invite individuals from other organizations to a network as a guest. The invited guests can then collaborate seamlessly with employees in designated workspaces, while confidential information from the rest of the network is kept completely secure. BVSN’s Clearvale is the only platform that allows businesses to create separate networks for employees, customers, partners, etc., while allowing the business to manage these separate networks together as one social ecosystem.

 

NIA is spent countless hours researching these 7 companies and testing our these enterprise social platforms. Besides there 7 companies, there are 2 other companies with platforms that NIA believes could have tremendous potential but we haven’t had the opportunity to test them out yet. One of them is Cisco Systems (CSCO), which has developed the platform ‘Cisco Quad’. CSCO is a $106 billion company and their ‘Cisco Quad’ platform is only a tiny part of the organization. The other company is Lithium Technologies, which recently raised $53.4 million in private venture capital funding. NIA estimates Lithium to now be worth over $500 million.

 

NIA has chosen not to waste space reviewing Salesforce.com (CRM)’s Chatter, even though CRM reached a new 52-week high last week of $164.75 up 62% for 2012 so far. CRM calls itself the “social enterprise company” and it has a market cap of $21 billion with Chatter being their flagship product. Chatter is a free enterprise social platform that started out as a messenger service before CRM added some social features on top of it.

 

CRM’s Chatter is most closely comparable to both Yammer’s free platform (Yammer is reviewed in this report) and BVSN’s Clearvale Express (a free platform that allows businesses to try out Clearvale before paying to upgrade to BVSN’s fully featured Clearvale Enterprise). Chatter doesn’t have anywhere near the features of Yammer and Clearvale Express. Despite CRM’s insanely high valuation compared to BVSN’s insanely low valuation, CRM’s Chatter is an inferior product while BVSN’s Clearvale Express is about equally as good as Yammer. When BVSN’s Clearvale Express users upgrade to Clearvale Enterprise, they are upgrading to one of the best fully featured enterprise social platforms available in the world today. The paid version of Yammer only gives its users admin controls, something BVSN’s Clearvale Express does for free. Other than the admin controls, the upgraded Yammer doesn’t have any new features that improve the platform over the free version

 

Company: Telligent Systems

Platform: Telligent Enterprise

 

Key Features Included: Search, Analytics, Profiles, Blogs, Media Supported, Wikis, Filters, Blogs, Comments, Tagging, Ability to Follow Co-Workers, Discussion Forums, Dashboards, Ranking System

 

Key Features Excluded: Projects/Tasks, File Sharing, Activity Streams/Microblogging, IMs, Mobile (available with extra package)

 

Telligent Enterprise is well known for its external forum based community platform. After many businesses began installing Telligent’s technology internally when it wasn’t in any way meant for that, Telligent decided to expand into internal usage.

 

Telligent has a very in-depth blog feature that is one of the best out of all the companies featured in this report. Telligent’s blog technology allows Telligent Enterprise users to access the most popular blog postings from display boxes located across the web site. Users can also rate each blog post that they read, which contributes to its popularity ranking. Users even have the ability to send and receive blog postings via email, which is unique in this industry to Telligent Enterprise.

 

Telligent is also a leader in discussion forums with unique Q&A capabilities that make the platform suitable for business support services. Some features of Telligent’s discussion forum technology includes the ability to edit postings, attach files, and easily moderate discussion forum postings.

 

A major disadvantage to Telligent is the fact that they do not have free support for mobile devices included with the Telligent Enterprise platform. Businesses must pay to purchase another separate package to be able to access Telligent Enterprise through smartphone devices such as the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android.

 

Telligent is very weak when it comes to analytics. The analytics functionality of Telligent Enterprise only provides reports with very basic information such as total users, postings, page views, etc. In today’s world, business demand in-depth analytics functionality and Telligent will need to improve in this area if Telligent Enterprise is going to have a chance of obtaining significant market share moving forward.

 

Telligent also does not offer any activity stream or microblogging services. Some of the best and most popular enterprise social platforms are built around their activity streams and microblogging features. Telligent will need to expand into this area if they want to have a chance of leading the enterprise social industry in the future.

 

Company: IBM (NYSE: IBM)
Platform: IBM Connections

 

Key Features Included: Search, Analytics, Profiles, Blogs, Media Supported, Wikis, Filters, Blogs, Comments, Tagging, Ability to Follow Co-Workers, Discussion Forums, Dashboards, Ranking System, Projects/Tasks, File Sharing, Activity Streams/Microblogging, Mobile

 

Key Features Excluded: IMs (available with extra package)

 

IBM Connections gives their users the ability to use many different applications right from the profile page. Some of the applications included on IBM Connections profile pages include online/offline status, detailed status updates, live chat sessions, colleagues tags, audio name pronunciation (unique to IBM Connections and great for international companies), and commenting.

 

IBM’s enterprise social platform IBM Connections revolves around the profile pages of their employees. IBM has done an amazing job with their feature that allows employees to search the profile pages of other employees for co-workers that have a certain expertise or skill. This will play an important role at encouraging employees to collaborate with each other and helping employees work more efficiently. If a company’s CFO needs somebody to design and produce a graphic to be included in their annual report, the CFO can search for an employee who specializes in graphic design that also has experience in the finance sector.

 

IBM offers many other social related applications that they frequently pressure their IBM Connections customers into using. For example, to have real time IMs and chat sessions through IBM Connections, you need to purchase IBM Sametime and integrate it with IBM Connections. Companies that use IBM Connections, which itself is very expensive compared to its competitors, usually end up spending a fortune more on additional applications like IBM Sametime, and IBM Lotus Notes and Domino. Businesses that choose to go with IBM Connections are best advised to avoid signing up for any of IBM’s other enterprise social apps.

 

IBM Connections offers the ability for a business to very effectively integrate a company’s network with Microsoft Office. From Microsoft Office apps like Word and Excel, users can quickly and easily pull up a “Profile Card” of any employee, which displays the most important basic information from their profile. Users can also post to their company’s IBM Connections enabled blogs and discussion forums directly from Microsoft Office.

 

IBM Connections has a good quality mobile application that works with the iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, PlayBook, Android, and Nokia (micro-browser only) devices.

 

Company: Jive Software (NASDAQ: JIVE)
Platform: Jive Engage

 

Key Features Included: Search, Profiles, Blogs, Media Supported, Wikis, Filters, Blogs, Comments, IMs, Tagging, Ability to Follow Co-Workers, Discussion Forums, Dashboards, Ranking System, Projects/Tasks, File Sharing, Activity Streams/Microblogging

 

Key Features Excluded: Mobile (available with extra package), Analytics (available with extra package)

 

JIVE’s Engage enterprise social platform is complete with one of the widest varieties of features and functions in the industry, but it doesn’t excel at any of them. Therefore, companies looking to deploy an enterprise social network that focuses on certain capabilities such as project collaborations, external discussions, Q&A functionality, etc., can most likely find another platform that is more suitable for them and much less costly.

 

Most enterprise social platforms allow employees to select their co-workers as their friends, with their co-workers needing to approve their friend requests, which then makes them both friends of each other. JIVE’s Engage is unique in this space because it has a Twitter-like follow system, where any employee can choose to follow any other employee without their approval and without them following back.

 

JIVE’s Engage platform uses a unique functionality called “spaces” that allows discussions to be setup by topic, department, and any other enterprise wide dimension. JIVE’s Engage allows you to attach documents and make comments in just about any area of a JIVE Engage-enabled network including its blogs, forums, wikis, activity streams, etc. documents to any other item as well as create team blogs as well as individual blogs.

 

JIVE recently updated and improved its microblogging functionality so that you can @mention people like on Twitter. If somebody @mentions an employee they are instantly notified in their activity stream. Besides people, you can also @mention places and content from within the community.

 

JIVE recently added additional features to their activity stream in order to make it easier to organize and filter. JIVE also created a “What Matters” marketing gimmick for their activity stream. JIVE’s new “What Matters” activity stream allows its users to have three different views of their activity stream by activity, communications, and actions. JIVE also now allows its users to easily filter their activity stream in order to receive a personalized view of updates from the people, places, and information they follow. Although JIVE’s new activity stream is much better than before, their competitor BVSN offers an activity stream on their Clearvale platform that also has very powerful organize and filter options, without the “What Matters” hype.

 

JIVE recently made an acquisition of OffiSync, which has allowed them to bring some of their enterprise social capabilities into Microsoft Office and Outlook. JIVE Engage users who are willing to pay an extra monthly fee per user for a special add-on module can now create content using Microsoft Office programs like Word and instantly share their documents with their co-workers through Engage. Their co-workers can view their Word document as they are creating it and can even make editing changes to it.

 

JIVE’s new Microsoft Outlook integration (also included in the same add-on module) features allow Outlook users to quickly and easily turn email conversations into discussions on the JIVE Engage platform. Users can also view and reply to discussions taking place on the JIVE Engage platform, directly from their Outlook inbox.

 

Although JIVE does offer Engage over the cloud, JIVE is not a pure cloud computing play. While companies like BVSN and Yammer offer their platforms exclusively over the cloud, many of JIVE’s customers use Engage as a software product on their own servers. Customers not using Engage on the cloud do not instantly receive JIVE’s programming upgrades and updates to the platform. This means many of JIVE’s customers are still using very old and out-dated versions of Engage, because they haven’t taken the time to upgrade the software on their servers.

 

The JIVE Engage platform is one of the most expensive enterprise social platforms in the world today. Once JIVE’s customers find out about competing platforms like BVSN’s Clearvale that provide most of the same features as JIVE plus additional innovative unique features for only a fraction of the cost, we could see many of JIVE’s customers switch platforms. In fact, while JIVE signed 40 new customers in the 4Q of 2011, JIVE also lost 30 customers and only grew by 10 for the quarter. JIVE needed to spend over $13 million on sales and marketing in the 4Q of 2011 alone in order to grow by these 10 customers.

 

JIVE’s Engage starts at $12 per user per month for a minimum of 350 users and doesn’t include many add-on modules such as mobile, analytics, video, Microsoft Office integration, and ideation. After these add-ons, companies can end up paying as much as $25 per user per month.

 

Company: BroadVision Inc. (NASDAQ: BVSN)

Platform: Clearvale

 

Key Features Included: Search, Analytics, Profiles, Blogs, Media Supported, Wikis, Filters, Blogs, Comments, Tagging, Ability to Follow Co-Workers, Discussion Forums, Dashboards, Ranking System, Projects/Tasks, File Sharing, Activity Streams/Microblogging, Mobile

 

Key Features Excluded: IMs

 

While many enterprise social networking platforms out there started out as either micro-blogging, instant messaging, or discussion forum applications and were built on architecture that won’t be best suited for enterprise social networking over the long run, BVSN’s Clearvale was built from the ground-up as an enterprise social networking platform using ELGG as its initial architecture. Furthermore, while competitors like JIVE are making a large percentage of their deployments off of the cloud, BVSN’s Clearvale is available exclusively over the cloud. BVSN is the only publicly traded company today that truly is an enterprise social networking cloud play.

 

Clearvale’s interface is very user-friendly and simple with a similar layout as Facebook, which users will recognize and easily adapt to. Clearvale is the only platform that allows businesses to create separate networks for employees, customers, partners, etc., while allowing the business to manage these separate networks together as one social ecosystem. Clearvale can be best described as a network of networks that are interconnected so that information and data can easily overlap networks. An employee who is a member of multiple networks can easily respond to a customer on their public external network and allow this information to flow seamlessly over to the company’s private internal network so that their co-workers can learn about an issue that a customer is experiencing.

 

Clearvale not only allows businesses to create separate networks that are both public and private, but Clearvale allows for the creation of hybrid networks that are semi-private. By giving businesses the unique ability to create hybrid semi-private networks, which is a function that no other enterprise social platform offers, BVSN’s Clearvale allows businesses to invite individuals from other organizations to a network as a guest. The invited guests can then collaborate seamlessly with employees in designated workspaces, while confidential information from the rest of the network is kept completely secure. Clearvale allows businesses to leverage Zones to create specialized workspaces for more targeted messaging and interactions with Guests, while also leveraging Conduits for more in-depth communication and collaboration with specific Guests in a totally private setting.

 

Clearvale offers every major enterprise social networking feature that businesses demand today except for IMs. BVSN offers a special Clearvale PaasPort program, which allows other companies to resell Clearvale to their clients. BVSN suggests to telecommunications firms and internet service providers that they integrate their own IM and voice services into their Clearvale offerings. SoftBank, one of the largest telecommunications firms in Japan, has already started to resell Clearvale through Clearvale PaasPort.

 

Clearvale’s mobile application is one of the best and most powerful in the enterprise social industry today, supporting about 80% of all the Clearvale services that are available from the web browser, one of the highest percentages in the industry. BVSN has so far released a mobile app for the iPhone and iPad that is now available for download on iTunes. BVSN will soon be releasing a mobile app for the Android. Unlike JIVE, which charges extra for an inferior mobile product, BVSN offers their Clearvale app for the iPhone and iPad for free.

 

Clearvale is the only platform with analytics that not only measures and tracks usage of the network, but also encourages network participation by establishing incentives for users to actively participate in their Clearvale-enabled community. For instance, a company can set goals for the users to reach and assign activity points for each specific goal during each month with incentives for users with the most executed goals.

 

BVSN offers a limited version of Clearvale for free called Clearvale Express, which allows businesses to try the platform without making an investment. Clearvale Express is just as good as Yammer and a lot better than Chatter. Once a business tries out and likes Clearvale Express, they can pay to seamlessly upgrade to BVSN’s fully featured version Clearvale Enterprise, which is one of the most reasonably priced fully featured platforms in the industry at a cost of only about $5 per user per month.

 

BVSN is utilizing the same “freemium” business model that made Yammer popular, except that when BVSN’s Clearvale customers decide to upgrade to BVSN’s paid version of Clearvale, they are paying to upgrade to a real enterprise social network. When Yammer’s customers pay to upgrade, they are paying to receive admin controls only, something companies get with Clearvale Express for free.

 

Also, while Yammer’s service is setup so that users need to have an email address with a company’s domain name to be able to join their company’s network, Clearvale Express makes this optional. Businesses have a choice when opening their Clearvale Express account to either limit their network to only users with the same email address domain name or to make possible for users with all email addresses to join their network. This gives BVSN’s free Clearvale Express a another huge advantage over Yammer’s free platform.

 

Company: Yammer
Platform: Yammer

 

Key Features Included: Search, Analytics, Profiles, Filters, Comments, Tagging, Ability to Follow Co-Workers, Discussion Forums, Dashboards, Projects/Tasks, File Sharing, Activity Streams/Microblogging, Mobile

 

Key Features Excluded: Blogs, Wikis, Media Supported, Ranking System

 

Yammer uses a “freemium” business model so that businesses can use their platform for free, but without administrative controls. Any employee of any business can setup a free Yammer account, which is how Yammer is able to claim that 80% of Fortune 500 companies use them. When the management team of a company wants to gain administrative controls of the Yammer account that they employees setup, they need to pay to upgrade to the business network version of Yammer.

 

Yammer is known as the Twitter of the social enterprise industry with a very simple and user friendly design. It started out as just a microblogging service years ago before transitioning into the enterprise social industry. Yammer excels at microblogging, although competing platforms like BVSN’s Clearvale also have very solid microblogging services of their own while also offering many more social features than Yammer.

 

Their platform is best used for internal enterprise social networking compared to external networking. To setup an external network on Yammer you need to use their “communities” feature. Yammer becomes very complicated when users participate on multiple external communities and internal networks. Yammer doesn’t offer the ability for businesses to manage their different communities and networks together in one social ecosystem like BVSN’s Clearvale does so successfully.

 

Yammer’s simple user friendly design has evolved past just short status updates like Twitter to now include the ability to give praise for co-workers, create polls, share documents, and create small discussion groups. Although simple, Yammer’s setup around their activity stream also creates a clutter like atmosphere which is nearly impossible to follow within a large corporation. One thing to help organize Yammer’s activity feed is its ability to filter out people within the network you do not want to follow.

 

Yammer’s platform design is good for Q&A within your organization. Yammer has a decent search capability that uses a real-time search to auto-suggest your search and results as you type. It is easy to share documents on Yammer and Yammer is beginning to offer some basic document collaboration services.

 

Yammer offers desktop and mobile versions of their platform, but they frequently lag behind and only offer a small number of the features and functions available on the web browser version. Yammer recently announced their new analytics features, but Yammer’s analytics functionality is very limited and doesn’t encourage employees to actively contribute to their Yammer-based community like BVSN’s Clearvale analytics does.

 

Company: NewsGator
Platform: Social Sites

 

Key Features Included: Profiles, Media Supported, Wikis, Comments, Tagging, Ability to Follow Co-Workers, Discussion Forums, Dashboards, Activity Streams/Microblogging

 

Key Features Excluded: Search, Blogs, Ranking System, IMs, Filterers, File Sharing, Analytics, Projects/Tasks, Mobile (available with extra package)

 

NewsGator’s Social Sites is a very solid add-on for Microsoft’s SharePoint. It is the leading social SharePoint add-on and a good addition for enterprises that already use SharePoint and want to deploy their own enterprise social network. Using SharePoint handcuffs an enterprise from being able to have microblogging services, activity streams, community services and specialized business applications such as Q&A. By integrating NewsGator’s Social Sites, you now can have the benefits of SharePoint alongside the functionality of a full enterprise social platform.

 

The one main function that Newsgator is missing is a blog. Although SharePoint itself offers a blog service, it is lacking compared to the blogs being offered on many other enterprise social networking platforms. NewsGator has transformed SharePoint’s simple status updates into a fully featured microblogging platform with comments, likes, hashtags, and filtering services. Another great feature for Social Sites is how it can recognize colleagues to recommend to users within the platform.

 

NewsGator does offer a mobile version of Social Sites for both the iPhone and Blackberry, but it is an add-on module that comes at an additional cost. Unfortunately, the add-on mobile version of Social Sites doesn’t give you access to the features of SharePoint, which can make things very complicating and confusing.

 

NewsGator’s Social Sites is weak when it comes to analytics with only information on page views and other basis data. NewsGator’s customer service struggles at times to keep up with customers since it is a very small company with not many employees. Our conclusion is that NewsGator is the best add-on for SharePoint available and that SharePoint users should definitely consider NewsGator to immediately give SharePoint the abilities and functionality of an enterprise social platform. However, if you don’t have SharePoint it is probably best to start off using a fully featured enterprise social networking platform like BVSN’s Clearvale.

 

Company: Socialtext
Platform: Socialtext

 

Key Features Included: Search, Analytics, Profiles, Blogs, IMs, Wikis, Filters, Blogs, Comments, Tagging, Ability to Follow Co-Workers, Discussion Forums, Dashboards, Ranking System, File Sharing, Activity Streams/Microblogging, Mobile

 

Key Features Excluded: Media Supported, Projects/Tasks

 

Socialtext is a wiki based enterprise social platform. It started out focusing entirely on wiki, but in recent years Socialtext has added social features and services on top of their wiki platform.  Socialtext is the perfect platform to choose for companies looking for a wiki service to use for managing their knowledgebases.

 

Socialtext has added a microblogging and activity stream service called “socialtext signals.” It is similar to what is offered by other platforms but unique in the fact that it updates based on recent wikis. Activity streams can be filtered based on activities and co-workers followed.

 

Socialtext has a similiar interface as Twitter and is very simple and user friendly. You can search for employees based off of their interests and areas of expertise.

 

Socialtext offers a mobile version called Socialtext Mobile, which is mainly suited for viewing wikis and less for editing them. The company hasn’t yet developed any mobile apps that are specific to particular smartphone devices.

 

Socialtext is more for a company’s internal capabilities and doesn’t fit in well for external networks. Therefore, companies wishing to use an enterprise social networking platform that is strong both internally and externally, should probably look elsewhere and consider a platform like BVSN’s Clearvale.

 

Disclaimer: NIA currently owns 158,000 shares of BVSN. NIA intends to sell its shares and can sell them at any time. NIA reserves the right to accumulate more shares at any time. NIA’s co-founders have also been referred business in the past from somebody who has filed as a large BVSN shareholder. Past performance is not an indicator of future returns.

 

NIA is not an investment advisor. This email is not a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell, or hold securities. Never make investment decisions based on anything NIA says. This email is meant for informational and educational purposes only and does not provide investment advice. NIA’s co-founders have previously disseminated information about BVSN in other media outlets.

 

 


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